Enhance your wildlife subjects

Using simple techniques in Photoshop, James Abbott shows how to make wildlife subjects stand out from their background

- James Abbott

It’s all too easy to get sucked into the idea that everything has to be perfect in photography. Sure, you should always aim to capture the best quality shots possible and process your raw files with care, but when it comes to certain types of Photoshop editing tasks, you can often get away with quite a lot. To put this into context, dodging and burning are traditional darkroom techniques that are highly effective yet crude in their application and that’s what we’re going to play on here.

Thanks to affordable long telephoto zoom lenses that deliver professional focal lengths to the masses, wildlife photography continues to grow in popularity. So, with this in mind, we’re going to look at four simple and, ultimately, fairly crude techniques that can help to make your wildlife subjects stand out from their backgrounds. By cutting a few corners, we can work at speed but, as we’ll see, this will have no detrimental effect on the final result.